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Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I worry a lot of the anti scraping rhetoric will just injure the open web and put somebody like cloudflare in charge.
Edit: the article says millions of times per hour? (!?)
The article is also astonished by this, and speculates it might be some kind of underground AI labs but... millions of them? Or does it only take one with too much money and a badly configured scraping setup?
You could perhaps even get website operators to "push" new data to a common crawl database. The scrapers would learn there is no value on scraping X domain because the data is available elsewhere more easily.
I think that nobody would care if I use wget or curl for few pages, e.g. because I would like to read a site as offline or archive it.
Btw average age of any page is 10 years. Deletion or structural change after acquisition is common, Signal vs Noise site recent wipe out could serve as an example why we need to archive sites.
I'm guessing the training companies are taking real/synthesized user queries and trying to distill what they can from site searches.
> Many providers build their proxy pools by partnering with device owners who agree to share their bandwidth, while others use embedded SDKs in free apps or VPNs.
WTF. That's just botnets.
Source: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2026/evading-re...
If they have consent, they're not really botnets. Botnets involve infecting devices without the owners knowing.
With consent, it wouldn't be much different from e.g. open WiFis at restaurants and hotels, companies using a single ISP and single public IPv4 address for all their employees, and most VPN services.
Highly unethical but the way the internet is going they're the last anti-hero of a somewhat open internet
unethical yes but really raises the question as to what we see is real or not
No they really don't, dishonest founders do that.
You're one with the lower case shibboleth so I have no doubt you surround yourself with dishonest founders, but faking users is pretty damn low on the usecases for residential proxies.
I said they're unethical because they tend to be hidden in innocuous seeming apps or sprung on unwitting individuals via clickwraps on their smart devices.
Disrupting the largest residential proxy network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46802748 - Jan 2026 (221 comments)
I did an experiment and linked from HN to my lame blog site and disabled all my anti-scraping measures. Even with all the bots I did not see that much traffic. I suspect some people are specifically being targeted by very poorly configured or very poorly written archiving scripts. Just one example thread discussing this with someone on HN [1]. Each case of being targeted will require looking at generalized characteristics but most are easy to stop in my opinion and experience.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416693
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243>
(AFAIK that specific failure mode has in fact been addressed.)
I have a custom HN CSS which includes some formatting of different sets of user accounts. Admins, for example, get orange highlighting and a dragon emoji (for one does not meddle in the affairs of ...).
Also included are leaders, which is the one part of my CSS build script which is, or at least was until a few minutes ago, dynamic. Presently HN is returning "sorry" to my curl request. Given that I run that build manually a few times a month, it's not a matter of hitting HN with frequent scrapes. But HN has become increasingly scrape-hostile over time.
Back in 2023 I did a crawl of all of HN's front-page daily history (365.25 days/year * 17 years, so about 6,200 requests), to answer a question which had come up about what was/wasn't mentioned in submission titles. That scrape included a delay (probably either 1 or 10 seconds, possibly more, I don't recall which and may have run the fetch directly from the command line), and ran (initially) without issues. I don't think it would fly today.
I reported on findings at the time and several times since:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36078578>
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
I don't get it. Don't we keep blacklists of this stuff? And if they hammer thousands of requests per site per second and never reuse an IP, they'd run out of addresses in a few weeks.
Then they'd switch to IPv6, and... well, are we using IPv6 for anything important?
Like we need it for IoT, but do you want random IoT devices talking to your web server? (IPv4 handled mobile phones just fine not that long ago, right?)
The question is more about why the US and others can't properly enforce the bullshit all this amounts to.
I'm not sure what the solution would look like - maybe Cloudflare's payment required for requests beyond a certain limit? But I think that the world needs user freedoms now more than ever.
It would cost too much money, either for police to raid all the physical shops and ebay sellers selling dodgy IPTV boxes, or for ISPs to hire enough competent support staff to monitor and respond to abuse@ email addresses and follow through.
I admit this is a naive question. I have no idea how applicable bt is to web requests. This problem just seems to have a similar “too many people want this resource” shape.
This is a good thing, thanks to this we have powerful open source LLMs.
> This activity overwhelms sites with traffic.
When LLMs get good enough, we won't need those sites anymore :)
[not satire, this is what I think, without self-censorship]
The poison gets better every day, and the community is continuously growing. Poison Fountain, alone, transmits hundreds of gigabytes of poison per day, which goes into scrapers, git repositories on every hosting platform, social media, etc.
Part of the poisoning community on Reddit, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/comments/1uocaii/a_n...
We ban such accounts regardless of what the single purpose happens to be. Pre-existing agendas are not what HN is for and destroy the curious conversation that it is supposed to be for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
10 comments (excluding subsequent in-thread replies) over four months, always in contexts in which either the topic of LLM scraping or Poison Fountain itself has already been mentioned.
This strikes me as contextually informational, and is no different from other project representatives appearing in threads discussing their own subjects or posts. Such as, say, Jon Corbet (@corbet), of LWN, whose activity on HN shows a similar pattern and roughly equivalent frequency.
I hope it goes without saying I'm not suggesting corbet's handle be banned, anything but.
atomic128's comments are predictable, but apposite, informative, non-disruptive, and address an increasingly urgent issue. Whether or not it's an effective mitigation is of course another discussion, but it seems plausible at first blush.
As dang should well know but others may not, I often contact mods directly for HN issues, including numerous "one-note flute" alerts. atomic128's account should be un-banned, though perhaps they might communicate with HN's mods over what would be a more acceptable mode of interaction.
Im not against the ban perse (single purpose accounts are bad), just curious if they had a chance to change their contribution style.
I wasn't aware of this project. Thanks for the heads up.
Really makes you think, what we're feeding them...
its very easy to detect and bypass poison type of tools largely because of the fact that there are far more outlets for truthful info so unless you can get everyone to buy in (with real legal liabilities) its not effective
also its possible to poison the poisoners with a certain pill that would have very real consequences for those maintaining whatever github repo/communities
Backbone operators should not be allowed to knowingly maintain connections to networks that allow connections from China or Russia.